Photo of Forest Haven Mental Asylum from 1924.
Hey, I’m in Baltimore right now! Were staying with our buddy Evan who is a photographer we met the last time we were on tour here in Baltimore. We had an off day today and we planned to go do a photoshoot in this abandoned childrens mental hospital that is reportedly haunted and take some new press photos for TWA. We attempted to drive up to the building, but there was a security guard who wouldn’t let us pass, so we had to drive the half mile back down the hill and carry all of my lighting equiptment through a “short-cut” through the forest. It wasn’t easy, but after a long, tiring trek through the woods and getting lost, we made it.
I was in complete awe of the asylum when it came into sight. The building was more massive than I ever expected. It was multiple stories with all the windows shattered out and the front door open for anyone to enter. The one time running hospital with patients entering daily, and not often leaving sat falling apart before me. We later found out that we were unknowingly about to enter Forest Haven Mental Asylum, notorious for its poor conditions and abuse of patients. During the early years, Forest Haven was considered a “state of the art” facility. With a good reputation this hospital set the standard for other states to follow. With declining conditions decades later many patients filed lawsuits against the hospital for reasons of abuse, neglect, poor living conditions… even medical testing. A small morgue was all that stood between the patients and a cemetery on site where graves have been repeatedly uncovered by erosion. Bodies of many of the patients have been found in the shallow graves on the abandonbed site. One patient was reportedly locked away in one of the rooms until he wasn’t a problom anymore, at that point he was wheeled to the morgue.
I entered the building with no idea of what I was about to see. Everything was decayed, shattered, rusted, falling apart, but yet everything was intact as it had been left. Wheelchairs leaned up against walls. Documents resting on tables. Mirrors hanging in dark hallways. A dentist office with dental tools ready for use. We made our way down the eroding stairs into the basement where the morgue was. It was a warmer day than it had been all week but as we entered the dark room the temperature drastically changed and our breath came out in billows of steam. We set up my equiptment as quickly as possibly and lit the room up revealing multiple sliding bins where dead bodies once layed. A pair of glasses covered in dirt with a missing lense. Old newspapers scattered across an examination table. Cold water dripped through through the cieling and dripped down my face. This was not a place where anyone wanted to stay for long, certainly not a lifetime. In the freezing room with daylight fading we started taking photos. Finding new “treasures” around every corner we turned. We took photos until the fading light left us standing in the dark cold coffin with our batteries dead and electronics failing.
Photos and video coming soon.
